The Rise of the Beatles and the Death of Mad Men

How the Fab Four created youth culture in America

Legend would have you believe that the Eisenhower years were an idyllic time in America, and that the election of John Kennedy in 1960 was the dawning of a new era. But the world that Eisenhower and Kennedy inhabited — the era of Mad Men's Don Draper and company — was sexist, racist, and homophobic, and steeped in fear of Communists in our midst. The culture consisted of Ozzie & Harriet, Ricky Nelson, and hit songs like "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" and cool was defined by Sinatra, Dean, and Sammy. Now those guys were cool, no doubt, but they were also old men to the growing numbers of young people in the early 1960s. Even Kennedy, to this day lauded as "young and vigorous," was 46 and coming apart at the seams physically.

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Then came Dallas.

At the dawn of 1964, America was still living a black-and-white existence, with a dead president, race riots brewing, and the deep dark secret of poverty about to come out of the closet. Buddy Holly had perished in a plane crash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had been censured, and Elvis had been emasculated by a stint in the Army.

"I think a lot of people would say that we still weren't out of the '50s," historian Robert Cohen notes in the great new PBS American Experience documentary about 1964. "America hadn't taken its coat and tie off."

Meanwhile, over in England, youth culture had shaken the Establishment. Gradually, beginning in October 1962, a band whose American label had dismissed them as unsellable, were redefining who and what was cool, and as a result who was really in charge. As they returned home from a triumphant tour of Sweden at the end of October 1963, greeted by throngs of screaming teenage girls, the band's fate crossed paths with Ed Sullivan, who had been visiting England with his wife and whose Sunday night variety show was the must-see TV of the era.

After some wrangling by intermediaries, Sullivan and The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein met in early November in New York and booked the band's February 1964 appearance. With the all-important booking in hand, Epstein and producer George Martin were able to prevail upon Capitol Records, the U.S. sister label of The Beatles' home in the UK, EMI, to put some promotional clout behind the forthcoming single and album, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and Meet The Beatles!. The rest, well, you know.

To mark the 50th anniversary of this watershed moment in pop culture history, The Beatles and Capitol have released a box set, The Beatles: The U.S. Albums, which includes 13 CDs, with only four titles that overlap with the band's recently remastered "official" UK output (and even those just barely correspond to the UK releases).

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Since 1987, and the first Beatles albums on CD, first- and second-generation American fans have had, in essence, to relearn everything they knew about the Fab Four. The American albums Meet The Beatles!, Early Beatles, Beatles '65, Beatles VI, Yesterday and Today, and The Beatles' Second Album — perhaps the first great rock 'n' roll album — were never released in the UK. And the U.S. versions of Rubber Soul (perhaps even better than the UK version) and Revolver, as released by Capitol in the mid-1960s, bear little resemblance to the UK versions. Rather, they were concoctions of Capitol and an in-house producer named Dave Dexter, who famously loved jazz and hated The Beatles. But those albums were how at least two generations of fans got to know The Beatles, and the impact of those records on American culture is incalculable.

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In 1964 alone The Beatles released six albums in America. The year marked the shift from an adult-oriented (or more accurately a white male-oriented) culture, which marketed middle-aged, middle-class products, to a youth-based culture.

"I remember wondering why my sister was screaming at the TV," musician Carlo Cantamessa, who played John Lennon in the touring company of the late-'70s Broadway show Beatlemania!, remembered of The Beatles' first visit to America. "After The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show, we'd ask to listen to their music in the car or in our house, rather than the Bing Crosby or Trini Lopez records my parents and grandparents played. It was a big cultural change because suddenly the radio didn't belong to the grown-ups anymore. Music suddenly belonged to everybody even if the adults recoiled when we put The Beatles on. But after The Beatles arrived we kids felt we had rights."

There's a scene in The Beatles' 1964 film A Hard Day's Night in which George Harrison is mistaken for just another bohemian youth and is asked his opinion of some clothing and the fashion line's spokesmodel. He wittily shreds the clothes and the model (and even the advertising account man) and is summarily dismissed as not yet a "sign of the new direction."

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"The Beatles were something completely new to the ears of teenage Americans," Allan Kozinn, author of the new book Got That Something! How the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" Changed Everything, told me. "The Beatles had absorbed all sorts of influences that made them unique by the time they got to America. Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Everly Brothers, and lots and lots of R&B. Before 1964, kids were hearing the Singing Nun, they weren't really hearing any of that music. In what seemed like an instant The Beatles changed how kids wanted to look and dress and what they wanted to listen to."

While the TheU.S. Albums set isn't precisely what teenagers heard in the mid-1960s (some of the most egregious victims of Dexter's use of "fake stereo" have been replaced by the 2009 UK masters, much to the chagrin of purist fans, but music to the ears of the iTunes-era kids I've talked to), they are still those albums in spirit.

"It seems like a bit of a scam not to use the original Capitol mixes," musician Marshall Crenshaw, also a Beatlemania! alum, told me. "But that said, the American albums that I grew up with are really special records that had a tremendous impact on millions of kids. In the 1960s The Beatles seemed to make the sun come up in the morning. They were enormously influential and revolutionary in all sorts of ways and that impact is still being felt today."

In time, the Mad Men adjusted their style and message and, cunningly, began marketing both directly to the young — hamfistedly aping their styles — while also marketing the youth culture to the middle-aged crowd. But after The Beatles, things were never the same. Old was out and young was in. So when you grouse about your kids' One Direction or Miley Cyrus fascination, just remember payback is a bitch.

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